The National Let Their Stirring Sound Ring Out

If there was ever a band who didn't fit the festival mold, it's the National. Their songs are late-night meditations on love, loss and regret — not exactly rousing sing-along material. However, that didn't stop a passionate crowd from turning downtrodden tunes like "Baby, We'll Be Fine" (with it's refrain of "I'm so sorry for everything") into unabashed anthem. The group's stirring indie anthems were augmented by a horn section, which gave "Start a War" a little extra gravitas. Frontman Matthew Beringer didn't seem fazed by the venue in the slightest — perhaps opening an arena tour for R.E.M. lent him some swagger — and he managed to whip the crowd into a frenzy while shredding his vocal cords during the set-closing "Mr. November," which he dedicated to Barack Obama.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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